Thursday, February 10, 2005

Broken Hearts Club: This past weekend, I was consulted on a patient admitted to psychiatry after a suicide attempt. As I was examining her, I explained I was going to listen to her heart, and she very softly said, "It's broken." The medical consult may have been appropriate:

A series of exams, including blood tests and angiograms, revealed that all of the subjects had a severe dysfunction of the left side of the heart. The same tests performed two to four weeks later, however, indicated that these defects had completely resolved.

The investigators noticed that these individuals had abnormally high levels of stress hormones, which can be toxic to the heart muscle. They hypothesized that this temporary weakening of the heart muscle may be triggered by the stress hormones.

The good news is the broken hearts bounce back. the abstract is here, as well as the curious observation that the syndrome is much more prevalent in post-menopausal women:

The median age of patients with stress-induced cardiomyopathy was 63 years, and 95 percent were women.